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Talk:Vera Kuznetsova
I didn't feel like looking up references so I called it a stub even though I think it's respectably thorough as it is but for that point. I didn't really feel like writing about her at all, but she was a huge part of McGill's arc, even if that arc has yet to prove plot-relevant to the rest of the story. And now that she's dead, and we've got all the appearances we're going to get out of her, it was hard to justify putting her off any longer, especially since I'm already on a bit of a tear. She was indeed killed by the CCP, by the way, not the Japanese. I'm yet to reach McGill's next scene so I can't say how his desire for revenge is going to orient itself (no pun intended--really!) Turtle Fan 23:09, July 22, 2011 (UTC) :Generally at the CCP, although he goes through a stretch where he finds ways to blame all Asians (Japanese for being dicks in China, making the CCP lash out; Filipinos becaue they sometimes look like Chinese), then his superiors (for not letting her out), the Soviets (for forcing her to leave her home), himself (for taking her to the movies), etc. Typical grief, in other words. The CCP gets most of the blame, but I think he holds Japan responsible as well. TR 22:08, July 23, 2011 (UTC) ::I was hoping he'd be put in a position where he was ordered to help the CCP with something and he has to decide between his duty and his hate. If he's going to get captured in Manila that won't happen. Maybe the CCP will rescue him? Turtle Fan 01:39, July 24, 2011 (UTC) I just read a little litany of whom McGill hates and why he hates each of them. There was reference to his superiors, and it was followed with "If Vera hadn't been a stateless person . . . " Umm, his superiors didn't make her a stateless person. For that you'd want to blame Karensky for starting the Revolution, or Lenin for finishing it, or Trotsky for leading the Reds to victory over the Whites, or maybe Nicholas II for being such a bad ruler that he gave rise to revolutionaries. Or the Imperial Germans for helping those revolutionaries get started. Or Gavrilo Princip for precipitating a war in which the Russian Empire would fall, or the Austro-Hungarian King-Emperors for shitting on the Serbs till they had enough grievances to give rise to the Black Hand. Or Bismarck and von Moltke the Elder for weaving all the smaller German states into a German Empire that excluded Austria, forcing Austria to expand to the south and east instead, and eventually become Austria-Hungary, and be ruled by King-Emperors who shat on Serbia till the Serbs had enough grievances to form a terrorist cell that assassinated Hapsburg royalty and got Vienna to go after Belgrade till Belgrade had to call for help from Petrograd, which in turn drove Vienna to invoke its alliance with Berlin, which led to a war between Germany and Russia in which the Germans supported revolutionaries against the rather sub-par Russian Emperor, and that revolution led to a civil war which led to the Reds ruling Russia and purging the Whites, so that the Whites had to try to go into exile and become stateless persons. The point is, Vera's being a stateless person is not McGill's superiors' fault. What is their fault, a little bit, is not unbending to help McGill pave over the legal issues related to Vera's statelessness. But really they can only do what Congress lets them, so Congress shoulders the lion's share of the blame there. And Congress told them not to work around the very restrictive immigration laws they set in place in the early 20s in the wake of the Palmer Raids. Which would likely not have happened if the success of the Russian Revolution hadn't inspired revolutionaries elsewhere and given Eastern Europeans a stereotype for violent radicalism, etc. Turtle Fan 22:00, July 24, 2011 (UTC) :Oh, I'm sure if he spent much time dwelling on it, he could have got to all that (provided he was sufficiently familiar with all that history). Such is grief. TR 00:52, July 25, 2011 (UTC)